Smartphones and tablets have sold like never before. With 300 million of ARM powered devices sold in 2010 and a projected 2 billion in 2015, the company is trying to capitalize on the situation and convert all the positive conditions to their ever-growing trees of money. The newly introduced Cortex A12 architecture is an improvement over the existing Cortex A9 (found in almost all flagships from 2012). The Cortex A12 will offer as much as 40% increase in performance while promising better battery life at the same time. The new CPUs will be manufactured in the 28nm manufacturing process (most likely at TSMC or Global Foundries). Did we mention, the new CPU supports ARM’s big.LITTLE design (along with a Cortex A7 CPU). Sadly, the first real world implementation of big.LITTLE didn’t really make a BIG impact (we’re talking about you Exynos 5 Octa). The Cortex A12 adds 40-bit memory addressability, consider it a stop-gap feature until the arrival of 64-bit Cortex A57/A53 processors.

ARM wasn’t done with unleashing just a new mid-range CPU architecture, the company also introduced to the world their newest addition to the Mali family of GPUs. Say hello to the mid-range Mali-T622 GPU. Offering up to 50% greater energy efficiency than existing Mali-T600 solutions, the new GPU is compliant with OpenGL ES 3.0 and boasts being the smallest GPU compute-capable solution in the market. The new ARM Mali-V500 Video engine promises greater power efficiency and playback.